Almond, Barbara. The Monster Within
This book examines maternal ambivalence and its manifestations in our society through a psychoanalytic framework, examining both clinical and literary case studies. Annotation Almond, Barbara. The Monster Within: The Hidden Side of Motherhood. Los Angeles, California: University of California Press, 2010. Print. In the book The Monster Within, Barbara Almond discusses the notion of maternal ambivalence, meaning the varying emotions mothers feel towards their children that range from hatred to intense love (what Almond refers to as “motherlove”), which can shift rapidly, appear to contradict each other, and often occur simultaneously. To do this, the author examines case studies from her work as a psychoanalyst as well as literary case studies, in which she analyzes the behavior and motives of fictional characters and/or authors. By closely examining the actions, intentions, and emotions of each individual, real or fictional, Almond brings into question what makes maternal ambivalence seem so unacceptable in our society; why both frustration and love towards a helpless, needy, crying infant seem so incompatible when housed within the body of one mother; why the stigma against anger and hatred as a mother has so dramatically increased in Western society in our time period despite the presence of (and during some historical times, the social acceptance of) filicide, infanticide, and neonaticide across all cultures and time periods; and why and how society and the media are harsh towards mothers who are “bad,” those mothers who fully unleash their rage, the “monster within,” and harm their children physically, psychologically, or even murder them. Within my research, Almond’s explanation of maternal ambivalence has been incredibly useful. In all of the other resources I have encountered, both primary and secondary, this lense has allowed me to take into account the needs of both the mother and child, how these often conflict, and the varied emotions and tensions this can create in the maternal figure who is held entirely responsible for the safety and well-being of the baby. This helps keep my own impulse to quickly judge and judge harshly in check. As a non-mother, it has given me deeper, more complex insight into the sacrifices being a mother entails and the societal pressures and expectations the role “mom” carries. Going into this project, I hoped to break down and better understand my own feelings of fear, anxiety, and hopelessness when confronted with a story about a mother who abused or murdered her child(ren). This almost disabling anxiety at hearing stories such as this started when I was in fifth grade and overheard my grandfather explain the infamous Andrea Yates story to my mother, who was at the time very stressed and going through a violent, drawn out divorce. I immediately became afraid of my mother, who had never physically harmed me or my two brothers in any way. I changed my behavior to always please her and make myself as invisible as possible, hoping that this would avoid making her “snap” and suddenly murdering all of us and then killing herself. This fear manifested itself in my later life in an avoidance of contact with children (especially infants) for fear that I would harm them unintentionally or psychologically, repeated nightmares about my failure to properly care for or protect various pets which leads to their death, an avoidance of any media that could potentially lead to an encounter with a story such as Andrea Yates, and debilitating depression, hopelessness, and suicidal ideology whenever I unexpectedly come across a story about filicide or child abuse with maternal involvement. Almond’s book, which opens with a discussion of Yates and later analyzes her case alongside Sethe from Beloved and Medea, two other resources I have had contact with on an academic level, allowed me to approach Yates’s narrative of multiple filicide, with the framework of maternal ambivalence in mind, from a more empathetic standpoint, one that was not firmly rooted in fear, repulsion, condemnation, and anger as I had been before. I especially noticed this shift in my attitude when reading Andrew Murr’s article “Motherhood and Murder” from a Newsweek issue published shortly after the filicide by Andrea Yates. Instead of condemning Yates, thinking, “How could any mother possibly hurt her children?”, I began to think, “Wow, how frustrating must it get to be a stay-at-home mother and have to home-school them? She can never get away from them. She never gets a break.” This attempt to understand Andrea’s position as a mother pushed into a conventional caretaker position but an overbearing husband and familial pressure towards stereotypical gender roles made it possible to grasp how a woman could become overwhelmingly infuriated by her own children. This empathy, mixed with the newfound awareness of Andrea’s history of intense depression and postpartum psychosis, created a fuller picture that allowed me to accept anger as an emotion that is not only available to mothers, but one which is fully appropriate, understandable, and inescapable given the social pressure placed on that role. Motherhood became a role that took on more than just the intense love between mother and child, but one which involved tremendous self-sacrifice from the mother and ignoring personal needs in favor of those of the child(ren); self-blaming and hatred at any failure to be a perfectly patient, perfectly loving mother; and the social stigma assigned to any woman who failed to meet this impossible standard of virginal, unwavering peace and love in the face of an always-screaming, always-crying, ever-needy child. This is a dynamic which is illustrated in Carol Tyler’s comic “The Outrage” in which the protagonist loses her patience with her child, experiencing momentary homicidal urges towards her child and suicidal urges towards herself, as she fails to balance her emotional needs with those of her baby, but cannot think of another way to deal with this impossibility other than to eliminate the “bad” baby she cannot adequately mother, and herself as a “bad” mother in her desire to harm her child. While my “impulse” response with its many complex emotions are crucial to note so that I can remain self-aware and self-critical during this process, I also think they are important when considering how the media reacts to and frames these cases, as well as the initial reaction of our society to such cases. When attempting to understand why the thought of a mother harming a child is so repulsive and incomprehensible in our society, it is important to remain aware not only of how the role “mother” is perceived and constructed, but also what position the child occupies. Almond says that our society is a “culture of child worship,” in which the needy and overwhelming behavior of children and babies is seen as “just how they are,” erasing the difficulties of attempts to cope with this behavior, and making children seem infallible in everything that they do, even as they begin to gain consciousness and recognize patterns in behavior that can benefit them (128). For example, this may include the child recognizing that if they throw a tantrum, their mother will buy them whatever they want. This is a manipulation of their position as children who are thought of as perfect, made to be pampered, and that if they behave badly, as when they throw a tantrum, it ultimately falls onto their mother who should have “raised them better,” giving no responsibility whatsoever to the child or the development of their own autonomous personality as they age, whether for better or for worse. The stigma of maternal ambivalence towards frustrating, stubborn, and demanding children lessens as children age, collapsing finally with the social recognition of the “troublesome angsty teenager phase” in which maternal ambivalence is expected and widely accepted, at least to a degree where it becomes socially acceptable to discuss teens’ (mis)behavior with other mothers and friends of the same age in a way that portrays the child negatively without having (relatively) as much stigma on the mother as hateful, “bad,” or a failure as a parent. This connection between age and stigma in social attitudes is interesting to note in relation to actual statistics on neonaticide, infanticide, and filicide. There is a negative correlation, as is noted by authors Cheryl Meyer and Michelle Oberman in the book Mothers Who Kill Their Children, between filicide and the child’s age. Meyer and Oberman write, “Increasingly violent means of death occur as the children get older. However, Smithey has noted that the risk of fatal injury actually decreases with each additional day of life” (45). As the stigma against maternal ambivalence and frustration decreases, with the stresses of parenthood being socially recognized and accepted, so the mothers feel more able to branch out, ask for help, and vent. This ability to seek help and speak without harsh judgement as a “bad mother” is a pattern which many sources I have encountered, including the above mentioned Andrea Yates article by Murr and the book Mothers Who Kill Their Children, Anne Lamott’s Operating Instructions, and Carol Tyler’s “Migrant Mother,” prove to be helpful in curbing violent, aggressive behavior in mothers toward their children. Mothers are socially allowed to decompress and back away from their sometimes angry and violent impulses rather than bottling these emotions, experiencing guilt and shame from themselves, family, peers, and society as a whole. This can prevent women from “snapping” by harming themselves, their child, or both. What this pattern reveals is that what is regarded as “bad” maternal behavior is subject to change based on various factors of the mother and the child, and how society understands these changes. Age is incredibly relevant to both parties, impacting them at various stages in complicated ways. This can be seen in relation to the mother in the Twine game I am creating where the age selected by the “player” changes how the judgemental speaker reacts to the character in the game. For the child, age allows them more autonomy and thus more responsibility for their actions in a way that lessens the mother’s burden of social stigma. The connection between the mother and her child’s behavior, in which she is assigned almost all responsibility for their actions at least while they are of a certain age, has historical roots in ideas about pregnancy and reproduction. Almond references the assumption in classic medicine that birth defects or deformities in the child were a result of the mother behaving improperly or having impure thoughts. The thought becomes, “''My womb'' is broken in such a way that it would produce something monstrous, thereby making me monstrous.” Almond expands on this idea by studying Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, making the “monstrous baby” utterly inseparable from the idea of the “monstrous mother.” The difficulty in separating these two ideas became evident in more literary and creative works as I progressed in my research. For example, this through-and-through responsibility for how and who the child is, their safety, and their behavior is evident in much of Rosemary’s feelings of failure to protect her unborn child in Rosemary’s Baby despite the tremendous and supernatural odds against her in the plot. Additionally, the depiction of Carol Tyler in “The Outrage” depicts not only Carol as a mother becoming a monster, but also alters the appearance of the child to be just a large mouth making a sucking noise, a symbol of the child’s neediness for her mother’s love, attention, and bodily resources. Almond’s discussion of monstrosity relating to both mother and child was key to understanding these texts in a more complex way that assigned responsibility and relative “cause” to the child, not solely the mother, in cases of maternal ambivalence. Quotes and Notes ...from Preface "There is an aspect of my clinical experience that it is important to keep in mind throughout this book. I see a wide range of patients in terms of the problems that bring them to therapy. However, most of them are middle or upper middle class in their upbringing and economic status." (x) “That mothers have mixed feelings about their children should come as no surprise to anybody, but it is amazing how much of a taboo the negative emphasis side of ambivalence carries in our culture, especially at this time. I believe that today’s expectations for good mothering have become so hard to live with, the standards so draconian, that maternal ambivalence has increased and at the same time become more unacceptable to society as a whole.” (xiii) “Parker listed below sees the guilt and anxiety that stem from widespread public condemnation of the negative side of ambivalent feelings at the real emphasis problem for mothers rather than the ambivalence itself which is normal.” (xv) “My goal is to further our grasp of ambivalent mothering as a normal phenomenon that can be understood and managed and to help women who are dealing with their own versions of ambivalence.” (xx) ...from Chapter One: The Ubiquity of Maternal Ambivalence “In the first chapter I define maternal ambivalence and elaborate a psychological spectrum of maternal behavior, from normative ‘good-enough mothering’--which includes normal, everyday ambivalence--to highly ambivalent mothering.” (xx) Andrea Yates (R.M. 3) --> mother who drowned her children that grandpa talked about in 5th grade. I was always afraid as a child that my mom, and any maternal figure around me, was about to “snap” Look deeper into academic research on women as either mad or bad when they become violent "If you hate your parents, siblings, spouse, friends, colleagues, or people of the opposite sex, or other races, religions, and nationalities, you are considered unfortunate, unreasonable, bigoted, interpersonally difficult, even seriously disturbed. But if you hate your children, you are considered monstrous—immoral, unnatural, and evil.” (2) Loneliness and anxiety at one’s own fatigue, anger, and depression --> finding safe places to express this without negative judgment Parenting class: “Although she had taken the class to learn more about child development, especially during toddlerhood, her most intense reaction was one of vast relief on discovering that other parents could feel exhausted, lonely, bored, and short of temper with their children. She learned she wasn’t alone. As this woman is both educated and emotionally sensitive, the degree emphasis of her relief was impressive.” (1-2) Psychologist: “My secondary purpose is to encourage women to seek help of various kinds, including the kind of psychological treatment in which they can be heard and understood without negative judgment or condemnation.” (2-3) Difference between open expression and acceptance “Several contemporary writers have tackled the idea that motherhood is not automatically an all-fulfilling state. Their work has been greeted with outrage and discomfort.” (3) “Aggression in women -- the behavioral emphasis manifestation of their hating feelings—is generally considered problematic, that is, not feminine. But when women’s aggression is aimed at their children, it becomes even more unacceptable. It is one of those societal problems that fill us with outrage and horror, even as some part of us secretly understands its normality.” (4) Evolution/history of maternal care/expectations From kin group raising to individual Class differences in experience (nanny and day care as a privilege) Self-enforced maternal perfection “Add to this conflicts between work and home and the absence of family support systems, and you have a situation that leads inevitably to increasing frustration and resentment as mothers are expected, and expect themselves, to be perfect.” (6) Speaks back to “Perfect Girl, Starving Daughter” ideology --> sacrificing own needs to those of their children to be the “perfect mother” Only thing worse than a bad mom is a non-mom “For not only is it unwomanly not to love your children unconditionally emphasis, but it is considered unnatural not to want children in the first place.” (7) Finding positive implications of ambivalence --> creative push towards problem solving “The English analyst Roszika Parker 1, who has written brilliantly about maternal ambivalence, sees it as a potentially creative process in which the mother has to actively think emphasis about the differences between herself and her child and come to solutions that allow for more attuned mothering. Parker feels that the anxiety and guilt that ambivalence generates in today’s society keeps us from seeing its creative aspects.” (9) Mention of David Winnicott and the “good-enough mother” (15) Consider Alison Bechdel’s novel Are You My Mother? and the kind of vexed relationship Alison has with her mother (i.e. her mom’s admitted preference of the brothers) Winnicott’s reasons for temporary hate (several listed on page 16) Look up Winnicott’s article “Hate in the Countertransference ” Polarity of mothers: good versus bad only instead of a spectrum of “success” “A central premise of my book is this: if women can come to understand their maternal ambivalence as a normal part emphasis of their emotional lives, they will seek help to deal with it more effectively, thus vastly increasing their chances of the happy and fruitful motherhood for which they so deeply long.” (21) ...from Chapter Two: Motherlove: The Power of Maternal Desire “In chapter 2 I describe some of my clinical experiences with these phenomena, then use Margaret Drabble’s novel The Millstone as further illustration.” (xx) “We come out of their bodies totally helpless and dependent, and human consciousness, in coming to grips with this reality, attributes to them enormous power for good and evil, for our survival and destruction.” (22) “When I saw her a few days later she had decided she didn’t have to nurse both babies entirely—she could supplement each with a bottle—and she was already noticeably calmer and more attached to the little boy. Her husband’s willingness to participate actively in infant care was also helpful to her in regaining her balance. This was a situation worth noting: a potentially harmful degree of ambivalence was arrested by a combination of crisis intervention therapy and spousal support.” (26-27) “Motherhood reconfigures family relationships, giving women a different status, usually a more special one. An experienced male colleague mentioned to me that it had been his repeated experience with patients who had recently given birth that they desire to have their mothers available, in some capacity, even if previous tensions existed between them. This wish for closeness to one’s own mother has been the experience of many of my patients, although not all.” (28) “For example, having an infant creates possibilities for gratification of the mother’s sensual needs, through skin contact, soothing, and cuddling the baby. Sometimes this leads to a decreased sexual interest in her husband, sometimes to enhanced sexuality in the marriage. (For both physicological and psychological reasons, some previously frigid women become sexually responsive after giving birth).” (28) DeMarneffe --> maternal desire as a means of self-growth for the mother and baby simultaneously ...from Chapter Three: The Subtle Ambivalence of the Too-Good Mother “In chapter 3 I discuss some forms of hidden ambivalence, an especially troubling situation because of the mother’s obliviousness and denial.” (xxi) This chapter is about perfectionist mothers and some feelings of failure but more focus on masked emotions; not super relevant to research ...from Chapter Four: "Before the Beginning": Women's Fears of Monstrous Births “In chapters 4 and 5 I present and illustrate the hypothesis I have developed to explain the underlying factors that may lead to ambivalence about childbearing.” (xxi) Fears of maternal ambivalence being projected onto the child --> fear of “monster baby” Historically, mothers (and their impure thoughts) have been blamed for “monstrous births” (i.e. birth defects) “Variants of this fear may permeate all phases of the female reproductive process: women fear they will not be able to get pregnant because their insides are abnormal, or monstrous; they fear that pregnancy will sicken, deform, or drain them, that their fetus is a parasite; they fear being damaged or dying in childbirth; and they fear that once the child is born, they won’t be able to mother it properly. Sometimes women fear that they won’t be able to love a child because it is different from the fantasized child of pregnancy, in sex, appearance, or temperament.” (53) Entire section “My Hypothesis on Monstrous Births” (54-58) #"...the child imagined as monstrous is a reflection of the monster within emphasis the mother, that is, the fear that maternal aggression is in some form passed on to or put into the child, using the mechanism of projection." (54) #"...the monster is an impossible child because it is, in the unconscious mind of the mother ''emphasis, a child born of Oedipal incestuous wishes or fantasies and, as such, must be denied, rejected, and seen as monstrous." (55) --> This point is a bit iffy. #"...a mother's fears of producing a monster child may relate to shame and anxiety about the ''meanings ''emphasis of being female, about the insides of her body and what that body may produce." (56) #"...the mother's relationship with her ''own ''mother...A woman's ''identifications ''with her mother and ''early disturbances or disruptions in the mother-child bond." ''(Almond's emphasis, 57) “Mary Shelley is a dramatic example of a woman who, for all the above reasons, could have experienced herself as monstrous, and it is with her and her “hideous progeny,” Dr. Frankenstein’s monster, that I want to begin. They can be discussed together because there is evidence (both in the novel and in the author’s letters and journals) that Shelley’s deepest worries “gave birth” to this novel. Mary Shelley ''is ''Frankenstein’s creature; he is the ''monster within her emphasis.” (58) Thoughts that mother died/left the child because they themselves (the child) were bad in some way Eraserhead has several violent and child images though I’m not sure how applicable it may be ...from Chapter Five: Women's Reproductive Fears: More Clinical Examples “In chapters 4 and 5 I present and illustrate the hypothesis I have developed to explain the underlying factors that may lead to ambivalence about childbearing.” (xxi) About case studies of women who fear making/having monster children; lots of Oedipal complex stuff; not quite fitting (some fear the baby for its monstrous qualities but no new insight from that in chapter four.) A note here: The author acknowledges her compulsion to assume that all women want to be mothers in the preface and how this assumption has been disproven several times (xii); however, she seems to default to that more than not, even when it means outright denying the verbalized wishes, desires, and longings of her patients in favor of some shaky psychoanalytic readings. THIS IS A BIG FLAW FOR ME!!! “With regard to pregnancy, she had the fear that she would suddenly feel trapped, with a similar feeling of impending doom, and would want the baby out of her. She could never consciously connect this feeling with a wish to kill the baby, but if she couldn’t tolerate it invading her body, how else could she get rid of it? Her focus was always on how unbearable the panic would be, never on why '' emphasis she would be so panicked.” (87) Abortions as a “get it out of me” reflex? “Priscilla’s problem, of which she was absolutely unconscious when she began therapy, was that the baby she needed to tear from her womb (and did in having two abortions) really represented her secretly hated siblings.” (87) Almond addresses this later in the book (in notes near end of chapter eleven) ...from Chapter Six: Rachel's Story: Internalized Ambivalence and the Dangers of Hidden Guilt “Chapter 6 is a detailed case history of Rachel, a patient who struggled with the less disturbed, more guilt-ridden side of ambivalent feelings.” (xxi) On internalized ambivalence On factors that make ambivalence worse: “Her story illustrates several common situations that may intensify ambivalence—conflicts between work and mothering, the effect of rigid social expectations of “correct” child rearing on a mother’s capacity to be confident and flexible with her child, and the power of early identification with one’s own mother to shape mothering behavior, to name a few.” (90) “Many women view work and the pursuit of a career as important parts of their identity and their sense of themselves as worthwhile people. Early identifications and attachments, to parents, siblings, and family members they wish to emulate and please, contribute heavily to these work and career identities. The satisfaction women derive from work can just as easily make them better mothers, more secure in themselves, and less dependent on their children for their own worth as it can derail mothering by creating exhausting conflicts, resentments, and guilt. For Rachel, success was itself a source of conflict, and this increased her ambivalence about working while raising children.” (91-92) “The panic attacks were fueled not only by Rachel’s unmet needs but also by her fear of her own race. She feared that she would lose control and either hurt her children or possibly kill herself.” (101) Good middle and upper class white girls aren’t allowed to be angry so she internalizes the rage, fear, and hatred. ...from Chapter Seven: Whose Fault Is It? The Externalization of Ambivalence “What characterizes the clinical and literary material in chapter 7 is the mother’s projection of her own ‘badness’ into her child, whom she then may blame or hate.” (xxi) On externalized ambivalence Women who hate their children --> see them as a kind of punishment Almond examines literary case studies --> all horror stories; links to shared monstrosity theme; "unloving mothers and unlovable children" (108) Doris Lessing ''The Fifth Child Tries to “rid herself” of the kid and fails --> what does this mean? How? Look at summary/synopsis Sends him to an institution but gets him out again later “Baby greed” (111) --> having more kids than one can financially afford as “monstrous” Almond earlier made a reference to “Octomom” and how she has been criticized in the media How is this mentality raced and classed in our society, with a focus on “Welfare Queens” and stereotypes surrounding single, African American mothers? In comparison to the 1960s London setting of the novel? (Opinion piece about sympathizing with a murderer on Andrea Yates brings up this dynamic/inequality.) “The experts see Ben as a sturdy, not very bright child, who tries hard and whose mother does not like him. They view Harriet with disapproval, although they deny this, and, reading between the lines, also with horror…Clearly, in the eyes of society to not be able to love a child is a heinous crime, not just a misfortune for both parties.” (116) “The pediatrician and child psychiatrist see Harriet as an unloving mother, and the attendant at the institution, as well as the psychiatrist, view her as if she and Ben are part of each other.” (118) “We wish to see, to believe in, a giving Madonna and a blissful child, not an angry witch and her greedy monster offspring.” (120) Lionel Shriver We Need to Talk About Kevin “In fact, when Eva does show her rage and hatred, Kevin respects her. He doesn’t believe in faked or forced love, which is what he usually gets from his mother and, in a way, from his clueless father, who loves the image of his own masculinity reproduced in his son, not the son himself.” (127) Ours as a “culture of child worship” (128) Ira Levin Rosemary's Baby Compares Rosemary to Andrea Yates: “Rosemary, like Andrea Yates, is trapped in a psychotic state, in which the baby, as the carrier of all her bad, psychotically distorted impulses, must be eliminated. In the grip of hormonal imbalance, as well as religious and societal attitudes that permit no real forgiveness for maternal aggression, both Rosemary and Andrea Yates can envision only one solution—stop the devil before he spreads.” (139) “As she lapses into unconsciousness, she apologized to the baby for not having it naturally. Later she is told the baby died and that she has had a prepartum psychosis.” (131) Guilt over failing to protect the baby. William March The Bad Seed Main mother figure saw her own mother murder her siblings at a young age “I include Christine as an example of ambivalent mother because her numbness and lack of emotional awareness, despite good maternal “behavior,” speaks to a serious kind of maternal absence, worse in a way than hatred, in which something is at least alive emphasis between mother and child.” (134) Quote from novel: “It was her duty to protect her child. What kind of a monster would she be if she betrayed and destroyed her own child?” (printed on page 136 in Almond’s book) “She will kill Rhoda with sleeping tablets and shoot herself. Her plan is only partially successful. She dies, but Rhoda is saved...Christine has been traumatized by witnessing the deaths of her siblings and by her knowledge that her mother would have killed her had she not escaped…In killing Rhoda, Christine attempts to kill the bad parts of herself, but since she cannot live with the idea of murdering her own child, as her mother did, she must also kill herself emphases.” (137-138) “The disturbing fantasy of child murder pervades all these novels in one way or another. Each of these mothers deals, consciously or unconsciously, with the question of whether or not to kill their children.” (139) ...from Chapter Eight: When Fears Are Realized “Chapter 8 deals with the management of maternal ambivalence ‘when the worst happens,’ that is, when a child is abnormal--physically, mentally, or emotionally.” (xxii) More about child/siblings understandings of deformity “In connection with the centuries-old fantasy that the monstrous (i.e., deformed) child was the product of the mother’s imagination or behavior, something is revealed to the world that the mother would rather keep hidden. Therefore, the deformity may be experienced by the mother as her shame, fault, or punishment. There was something she failed to do, or should not have done.” (142) ...from Chapter Nine: From the Child's Point of View “Chapter 9 poses the question of what children do in the fact of maternal ambivalence.” (xxii) Mainly about kids coping mechanisms to ambivalent mothers ...from Chapter Ten: Vampyric Mothering: From Stage Moms to Invasive Moms “In chapter 10 I describe a spectrum of maternal overinvolvement--from stage mothers who never miss a performance and whose lives seem totally taken up with feeding themselves through what their children bring them to invasive mothering, a form of child abuse in which the mother invades the child’s autonomy both physically and psychologically so that the child cannot act or think for itself.” (xxiii) “At the end of this spectrum is vampyric mothering, which I consider to be, in its extreme forms, maternal ambivalence at its most destructive. I conceptualize this kind of mothering as having two divergent but frequently overlapping characteristics. The first is a feeding from the child to obtain gratifications the mother is unable to obtain in other ways. In its milder forms, this is the overly involved mother (the stage or soccer mom) whose narcissistic needs depend so much on her child’s accomplishments and attachment to her that love of the child is always somewhat conditional on the mother receiving this kind of feeding. The second, more ominous form of maternal vampirism is a focing of ‘food’ into the child—food in the form of ideas, behaviors, allegiances, and beliefs, in particular, beliefs about the nature of human relationships—to a degree that may totally co-opt the child’s autonomy, defeat creative effort, and lead to a paranoid view of the world. (‘The only people you can trust are your blood relatives,’ or ‘The only person you can really trust is me. I know what the world is really about.’) This can lead to a level of emotional abuse in which the child’s most basic needs and sense of reality are disregarded. Such mothers can literally drive a child crazy by invading their minds and wills, a form of poisoning. I assume the reader understands that these behaviors are found in fathers as well as mothers, but I feel that in fathers they are not viewed as quite so dangerous (perhaps erroneously) because of the mother’s larger formative role in the child’s early developmental life emphases.” (165-166) “Moreover, since children hold their mothers responsible for their bodily vulnerabilities, Stoker may have had the fantasy that she caused his illness and kept him weak. Fears of an overpowering, intrusive, and controlling woman are an undercurrent in Dracula.” (171) “As a monster baby, Dracula makes women into bad mothers. When he vampirizes women he turns them into nonmaternal, sexual predators. When he vampirizes Lucy Westenra, a sweet, loving young woman, he turns her into the Bloofer Lady, who, as a vampire, now feeds on emphasis children, draining their life’s blood.” (173) “It is a more universal uneasiness with the intensity of unbound female sexuality, seen as totally incompatible with maternity. But it is also a horror at a maternity turned monstrous, one that feeds on children rather than feeding them, the mother as vampire.” (177) “In Joanna Trollope’s Other People’s Children, the mother, Nadine, keeps her children poor, cold, deprived, and indifferently educated as an act of revenge against their father and his new wife, who live in a comfortable and hospitable home. Nadine’s three children are faced with the knowledge that their mother will consider them disloyal and damaging to her if they love their father or develop a positive relationship with their stepmother.” (182) “Vampyric mothering is a subtle form of child abuse. Usually, no real physical harm is done, but the erosion of the child’s sense of self, sense of reality, and self-confidence can be devastating.” (184) ...from Chapter Eleven: The Darkest Side of Motherhood: Child Murder “Child murder is the issue I address in chapter 11.” (xxiii) This is the chapter we read for Intro to GWSS “It would seem that child murder is the most extreme and shocking manifestation of maternal ambivalence we can imagine. Yet, curiously, it is more understandable and perhaps less terrifying than extreme vampyric mothering, where the mother survives by possessing her child’s mind and will, creating a death-in-life. For, if we look at case histories, we can see that child murder is almost invariably the result of maternal despair about conditions in which it is impossible to raise children, at least, for that particular mother, at that particular time emphases.” (186) Infanticide: look up slave women who used a needle in the back of the babies’ heads to cause their jaws to lock up so they could not be fed and would starve to death (usually done with “rape babies” of slave owners that the women did not want --> Sethe’s mother in Beloved “throws away” or swears off these babies but keeps Sethe, as she was born out of a genuine, consensual, loving relationship) “By the twentieth century mental illness has moved to the forefront of causality as it has become clearer that child deaths occur where both social and intrapsychic conditions make mothering and parenting unbearable or impossible emphasis.” (186) Impact of postpartum depression Shame, guilt, self-hate, baby-hate, anger, sadness, hopelessness “Good mothers don’t become depressed.” (187) Think about the episode of Scrubs after Carla gives birth: She becomes depressed and scared, resistant to leave the hospital with the baby “Women suffering from such psychosis may kill their children because they fear them as fiendishly monstrous and dangerous, but beneath this they may really kill to save the child from their own projected aggression and its potential damage.” (Almond’s emphasis, 187) “Other women express anger at offspring with murderous words: ‘I could have killed her!’ ‘I felt like hitting him over the head with a baseball bat!’ And they mean it. But they don’t do it.” (190) “They were not the product of shameful forced couplings with white men or black.” (196) In Beloved, no, but for Margaret Garner in real life, there is some suggestion of the slave owner as “Beloved’s” father specifically, identified through her lighter skin tone --> hence “modern day Medea” (taking away another potential sexual target by killing a girl and taking away paternal control/connection by killing his child) --> look up more about this/Margaret Garner’s case for annotation on Beloved “The murder is partly an attempt to omnipotently deny the reality of her total helplessness.” (198) “Her desperation to get her milk to her baby girl is an attempt both to make up for her own deprivation and to prove that her children cannot survive without her, that she really loves them, and that she has some power and agency in her life.” (My emphasis, 198) “In Beloved it is made clear that letting an unwanted baby die is an acceptable behavior in the face of forced sexual couplings and the inevitability of family breakups as part of life under slavery, but active murder, even if meant to ‘save,’ is not.” (201) “If deceived and abandoned, they were then, in their minds, disempowered and left at the mercy of aggressive impulses threatening to themselves and others. These women feared that out of female destructive rage, they would kill their children. Psychogenic sterility and frigidity because desperate solutions to their dilemma. Interestingly, successful outcomes in these cases were associated with acceptance of these disturbing aggressive impulses.” (Almond’s emphasis, 204) A note from chapter five shows me questioning Almond’s stance on abortion as child murder. She addresses this on pages 207-209, saying that legal abortion could, in fact, decrease child murder by giving overly stressed mothers more control over their lives. “In my mind, this was not the murder of a child but of the child’s desperate and overburdened mother…If she had had this child, she might have been a loving mother, but the odds are she would have been overburdened and exhausted and highly ambivalent. Those who claim that abortion is the murder of a baby do not consider the fact that the ambivalence engendered by an unwanted birth may lead to a much more serious outcome.” (207-208) “The most disturbing form of child murder, in my eyes, is that of children who die as a result of chronic abuse—starvation, beatings, exposure, neglect. The media thrive on these stories. Often the father or boyfriend is involved. A mother’s pathologically strong dependence on a jealous and sadistic partner may erode her fragile positive connection to her child. Alcohol and drugs may play their part in loosening controls. Maternal immaturity, uncontrollable maternal aggression, and impulsivity all contribute to a form of the dark side of motherhood that, to me, is even more horrifying than are murders carried out in a state of psychosis or dissociation. Child Protective Services may rescue a certain number of these children, but far from all. And rescued or not, their suffering is long and tragic—children abused and neglected by the parents they depend on or separated from parents whom they love and need, despite their abusive behavior. As I have emphasized throughout, mothers need to be able to forgive themselves and move on, and children need to be able to forgive their parents as only human, but at this, the darkest end of the dark side, forgiveness may be impossible.” (209) Beloved cannot forgive Sethe. She leeches power and energy from her to “make her pay” for what she did, bringing Sethe to the edge of death. When you google “monster mothers,” several articles appear with this phrase, referring to this kind of long-term abuse. --> Rebecca Shuttleworth ...from Chapter Twelve: What Happens Later: The Fate of Maternal Ambivalence “In chapter 12 I discuss some of the vicissitudes of maternal ambivalence in later life, when children grow up, leave home, marry, have children themselves, and their parents become grandparents.” (xxiii) “For first-time mothers life as they have previously known it is turned upside down. Even when babies are deeply desired, the adjustments are challenging. Being confined to the house by the schedules of infants and babies may be trying for women who have been previously active in the world outside of the home. Career modifications are necessary but difficult to arrange, and marital strains are very frequent. Additional children increase the strains on mothers, although experience and familiarity with the needs of children tend to mitigate some of the difficulties. Hormones abound, creating unstable moods (baby blues) and, for some unfortunate women, full-blown postpartum depressions.” (211) This chapter is a general discussion of how maternal ambivalence can change, for better or for worse, easing ambivalence or heightening these feelings. Age growth/developmental changes Relationship changes (mother-->grandmother or mother-->mother-in-law) Historical/social shifts Conscious efforts of both parties (mother and child) ...from Chapter Thirteen: What's a Mother to Do? “In chapter 13 I review and expand on the pressures mothers in our society face--in particular, the pressures of contemporary prescriptions for perfect mothering.” (xxiv) “If this patient had hated her husband, her parents, her siblings, or the therapist herself for that matter, my colleague would not have been consulting me. She was troubled by her difficulty maintaining an objective, nonjudgmental stance. After all, she told me, Rose has not hurt her daughter, nor is that likely to happen.” (225) “You cannot trust your instincts if you think about them too much. And today’s women, especially middle- and upper-middle-class women, who tend to be the people I see in my clinical work, certainly do a lot of thinking, a lot of reading, a lot of talking to friends, and a lot of worrying. Women from lower socioeconomic groups also do plenty of worrying about their mothering, but their choices are so much more limited by their economic situation and the social problems they face—employment, housing, health care, and education—that they don’t have the luxury of choice that comes with a comfortable middle-class existence.” (227) Still very ambivalent but in some different ways. BUT I would argue that they will experience many of the same pressures. They still want what’s best for their children, still see the same ads, and read the same articles in junk magazines, that those women who “have” see which puts the same pressure on them. Think about how upset Mom would get when she struggled. Her sadness over not being able to get me braces for so long (which we still were only able to get with help from Aunt Eve) despite our general household knowledge that money was really tight; her self-hatred and shame that we didn’t all have cars and new clothes all the time, that our Christmas gifts were always things we really needed (new socks, new underwear, a new pair of jeans, etc.) instead of “luxury” items-->even though we had no choice in the matter, she was still embarrassed and felt that she should be able to and needed to provide these things to be a “good mom” “I believe that the place we, as a society, have to start is with the recognition of the enormous pressures mothers face and the normality of the wide range of feelings they experience toward their offspring. We have to start with the recognition that there are many different ways to mother, that each mother-child unit is unique. We have to recognize that humans, social and flexible beings that they are, follow fashion in all areas of their lives; but when the passion for fashion invades child-rearing practices, to the exclusion of common sense, it can be a recipe for disaster.” (230) “The psychoanalyst James Herzog, who has written extensively about fathers, posits a crucial set of functions that the father performs in the family, which he calls the ‘paternal principle.’ The father, he believes, affirms the reality of age differences between generations and the reality of gender differences and diversity in the family. The mother, who falls in love with her baby in the grip of ‘primary maternal preoccupation,’ may forget that she is also a woman and a wife. She may wish her husband to become a second mother—what Herzog calls the ‘Mr. Rogers preference.’ There is little room in this preference for adult sexuality, and it is up to the father to make a bid for the needs of the adult couple, separate from those of the infant and child.” (232) This sounds shady. Maybe she doesn’t want a “second mom” but a spouse who helps with housework and basic baby care (not just tossing the baby playfully into the air sometimes but changing diapers and feeding them) Also, why is it so important to have a clear display of “gender differences and diversity”? The direct quote from Herzog doesn’t emphasis or express gender as something that is diverse, but the need of the father to maintain a reference point of “good-enough masculinity and paternity” by “remaining grounded in his adult sexuality” and to “manage the mother’s need for both a second mother and a father/spouse.” Still holding masculinity as needing to be firm, strong, and controlling of the feminine figure who is over emotional, doesn’t know what she wants (“may think she needs…”), and must be present to serve the father’s masculine, “adult sexuality” (“beckon his wife to join him in that realm”). I’m just becoming more and more angry as I go through and analyze this section. It seems very gender binary, put pressure on the father, not to help in child care AT ALL but to just stay as he was before essentially, a manly-man who is sexually active, distanced from the “too deep” bond with the child that the mother has and cannot control, and “manage” the mother who apparently loses her mind and herself entirely when she has a baby. Wouldn’t the husband’s involvement in domestic work/childcare in a more active way more accurately and positively display gender “diversity”? And isn’t the spreading out of labor/childcare one thing Almond has point CONSISTENTLY to as a tool to ease maternal ambivalence this entire time? (see note from chapter two) Perhaps the mother is “too involved” with the baby, thus making it necessary to “beckon” her into the sexually active adult “realm” because the father take little or no responsibility or action in the child’s life, emotionally, in daily activity, in the compounded level of domestic work that accompanies the presence of a child. Herzog seems to be using psychoanalysis to maintain gender stereotypes and binaries instead of breaking them down and offering new solutions. Although this is the only portion of his work that I have read, Almond’s interpretation of the passage seems flawed and the passage itself seems to suggest the maintenance and continued practice of stereotyped gendered roles. “The final assumption that I am making is that this painful issue can be ameliorated in a variety of ways, if women can come to accept that their feelings do not make them unnatural pariahs, unfit to be mothers, unfit to be part of the human race.” (Almond’s emphasis, 237-238) Potential Resources Mentioned #Roszika Parker Mother Love/Mother Hate: The Power of Maternal Ambivalence (1995) #Mary Shelley Frankenstein (Originally published 1823) --> Fear of monstrous births/children #“’I Killed My Children’: What Made Andrea Yates Snap?” Newsweek July 2, 2001 #Anna Quindlen “Playing God on No Sleep” Newsweek July 2, 2001 #Peggy Ornstein Flux: Women on Sex, Work, Love, Kids and Life in a Half-Changed World (2000) #Anne Lamott Operating Instructions: A Journal of My Son’s First Year (1994) #William March The Bad Seed (Originally published 1954) #Lionel Shriver We Need to Talk About Kevin (2003 novel; 2011 film) #Ira Levin Rosemary’s Baby (1967 novel; 1968 film) --> Rewatch and look for helpful portions or applicable scenes/anxieties about motherhood #Cheryl Meyer and Michelle Oberman Mothers Who Kill Their Children (2001)